• Electronics and Telecommunications Trends
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.12-22
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• 2021

Since the technical realization of self-aligned planar complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors in 1960s, semiconductor manufacturing has aggressively pursued scaling that fruitfully resulted in tremendous advancement in device performances and realization of features sizes smaller than 10 nm. Due to many intrinsic material and technical obstacles, continuing the scaling progress of semiconductor devices has become increasingly arduous. As an effort to circumvent the areal limit, stacking devices in a three-dimensional fashion has been suggested. This approach is commonly called monolithic three-dimensional (M3D) integration. In this work, we examined technical issues that need to be addressed and overcome to fully realize energy efficiency, short latency and cost competency. Full-fledged M3D technologies are expected to contribute to various new fields of artificial intelligence, autonomous gadgets and unknowns, which are to be discovered.